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name: rust description: Best practices for Rust development including ownership, error handling, and async patterns. globs: ["/*.rs", "/Cargo.toml", "**/Cargo.lock"] priority: 90 tags: ["language"]

Rust Best Practices

Ownership & Borrowing

• Prefer borrowing over ownership transfer
• Use &str for function parameters over String
• Clone only when necessary
• Use Cow for maybe-owned strings

Error Handling

• Use Result<T, E> for recoverable errors
• Use panic! only for unrecoverable errors
• Use ? operator for error propagation
• Create custom error types with thiserror
• Use anyhow for application errors

Idioms

• Use iterators over manual loops
• Prefer pattern matching with match
• Use Option for optional values
• Use derive macros for common traits
• Use clippy for linting

Performance

• Use release builds for benchmarks
• Profile before optimizing
• Consider using Box for large stack types
• Use Arc/Mutex for shared state

Async

• Use tokio or async-std runtime
• Use async/await for async code
• Avoid blocking in async context
• Use channels for async communication